


Manifold Directions

by Hilarita



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-20 16:19:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4794173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hilarita/pseuds/Hilarita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tiffany learns about travelling in time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rmc28](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rmc28/gifts).



Eskarina can't really remember when she first started her work with Time. It didn't come out of the first work she and Simon did on the withholding of power, but later, it seemed inevitable. Witchcraft allowed you to see the many 'Now's, and pick the one you wanted ('going down a different leg of the Trousers of Time', the wizards called it). Wizards had never had much luck with time travel; the best results meant that only the time-travelling wizard ended up smeared across 17 dimensions, leaving only a faint smell of pepperoni.1 Witches just didn't see the point in time travel: the past had already happened, they could persuade the present into doing what they damn well pleased, and they could perfectly well take care of the future when it deigned to turn up.  
But sometimes, when you drew a chalk circle, and very deliberately didn't put power into it, and very loudly didn't say the invocations, you could get a glimpse down the Trousers of Time.2 It was faint and wavery, and quite hard to identify, like a scrying that had gone wrong.3 Of course, you could scry into the past, but it was usually a lot of effort, and you could usually get the same results by using headology, or Nanny Ogg.  
And then, after a few tries at that, she'd spotted one of the saffron-robed monks in the past. So she took her staff (disguised again as a broom) and went and swept the Temple of Offler next to a little monk. And in the sweeping, she found the Now that can take you out of Time (at least as far as other people are concerned), all without uttering a single word.4 Esk privately thought that using cleaning as meditation was cheating, but also thought it was a nice change to see men cleaning, because that was something you didn't see at all at the University.  
She also spent time in the Library. She provided the Librarian with a sack of peanuts and politely5 asked for his help with the Klatchian section. Learning to read Klatchian was much harder than learning to read Morporkian. Eskarina was of the private opinion that any language that could be terminally confused by a dead fly on the page was poorly designed. It made Klatchian mathematics even harder, but then she and Simon had even more ways to capture and describe the anti-magic.  
She didn't work much with Simon these days. His speciality was Space, and hers was Time. She spent a lot of time on the Unreal Estate, and possibly Simon spent time curled up in an n-dimensional hyperextension of his University rooms. Eskarina felt more at home in the in-between space – these days, in the spaces in-between time. 

1\. Though that was possibly just the wizards in the High Energy Magic building being careless with their takeaway.  
2\. Which could give you a nasty surprise if you looked in the wrong direction.  
3\. Not that many of Esk's scryings had gone wrong; Granny Weatherwax had trained her out of this quite quickly.  
4\. The Temple was exceptionally clean that year.  
5\. Eskarina was always polite to the Librarian, because only an idiot who didn't want arms any more would be rude to a large simian wizard.  


****************  
The winding journey to be someone who worked with time made it very hard, when Tiffany, on one her visits to Preston, came back to the Unreal Estate to learn about time travel. They both knew this would have to happen,6 but it all seemed too intentional to Miss Smith. Time travel happened when you had ignored it, and then, you were practically required not to do magic, especially for travel. It was quite clear to Eskarina that a number of incinerated time-travelling wizards had tried to do the snap-your-fingers translocation thing, and found that the string structure of the universe has gone spoing. Eskarina had tried to use a broomstick exactly once when time-slipped. She'd arrived back in her room with her hair and broomstick on fire, and a strange elastic snapping sensation in her drawers. Fortunately, Eskarina liked walking.  
The problem, Eskarina thought, was that Tiffany was a very grounded witch. Eskarina hadn't been, one reason she'd had such an affinity with wizard magic, which was much more about where your mind was than where your bones were. Tiffany always knew exactly where she was, and what she wanted to do. This made it difficult to coax her out into the fuzziness of time. Witches understood liminality, but they also understood knowing where they stood, and moving through time was all about tactfully ignoring that, and sort of wafting past the power of certainty. Eskarina thought that time travel would be easier for an anti-Tiffany. She couldn't really tell Tiffany this, because that seemed likely to make it all much harder. 

6\. Eskarina didn't explain it with ants and grandfathers, which she was privately convinced was a trick to confuse people so they're too scared to do anything that might cause a paradox in the past.


	2. Transitive Conversations

In some ways, Tiffany took to the not-using of magic very well. Her circles of power positively ached with the not-magic of it all. The chalk practically tried to crawl off the stones to get away from it. But the visions that tended to eventuate were more of the tentacly, Dungeon Dimensions variety, rather than the streams of time. Fundamentally, Tiffany was a space witch, not a time witch.  
Simon had said something about space and time really being the same thing. But they seemed to cross over in such a strange way that it was hard to see the connection. Eskarina slipped back in to the Unseen University to talk to him. This was not at all straightforward. It involved going down a corridor with red and white geometric tiling on it, while not touching the floor. Fortunately, Eskarina had her broomstick with her, so this wasn't too hard, although the broom didn't really like flying so close to the ground, and tried to scrape her off against the ceiling. It's possible that words like 'bloody dwarves' floated by. She also had to dodge a copy of Simon from last Tuesday, who was dithering around in one of the doorways.  
Simon, when cornered, was more than willing to talk.   
“So there's a tremendous energy differential between two different times.”  
Eskarina looked rather blank.  
“You know how if you translocate something across the Disc, you have to sort out the difference in the speed it's travelling and the speed the Disc is travelling, otherwise it goes splat?”  
Eskarina nodded. She'd heard about what had happened to Rincewind. It had formed the topic of conversation in the UU Uncommon Room for months, and Simon had told her about it when she'd been learning about time travel.   
“So to be in the Now, in the time-not-passing place you go to, what's happening is that you're relativistically accelerating the rest of space-time to a higher fraction of the Disc's meta-lightspeed, so you are taking basically no time at all, but the rest of the Disc is going from Now to Then – it's as though the rest of the Disc was moving a tiny amount forwards.”  
“So you can treat it as a massive spatial translocation?”  
“Effectively, yes. But accelerating the rest of the Disc involves increasing its mass, so you need to be very careful, otherwise Great A'tuin notices.”  
Both Eskarina and Simon were silent for a while, contemplating what happens when a giant space turtle thinks it's all getting a bit heavy, and tries to buck the elephants off his back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any fic where you have to read up on General Relativity to solve your fic problems is a good fic.


End file.
